Diving Deep into Biodiversity

About the Lecture

Global Biodiversity is the most valuable resource on Earth. It provides the oxygen we breathe, the food we eat, likely contains cures to many human diseases, and it holds keys to solving important challenges that humanity will have to overcome to survive.

Biodiversity is the great library of life on Earth, accumulated and evolved over billions of years. It is vast and still largely beyond human knowledge. Indeed, even now we are like kindergartners peering through the aisles of a great Universal Library, hardly aware even of the enormity of the information around us, and largely oblivious to its value. Indeed, after more than 250 years of scientific effort, humanity has managed to identify less than 10–20% of earth’s biodiversity. The remaining 80–90% (undiscovered species) remain entirely unknown to us. And very little is known about even those that have been named and catalogued.

Almost by definition, the species we already know are the ones that are easiest for us to find. Many undiscovered species, perhaps the vast majority, inhabit parts of the planet that are exceedingly difficult for humans to access. Oceans cover 70% of the Earth’s surface, and represent 99% of habitable ecological volume. As terrestrial mammals, humans are limited in their ability to explore undersea environments, replying on simple technologies to peek into the shallowest depths, and expensive submersibles and other devices to plumb the abyss. Oceans remain a great unexplored frontier, particularly their depths beyond the reach of ordinary SCUBA diving technologies and techniques.

Coral Reefs are often described as the “rainforests of the sea,” harboring an incredible array of diverse organisms. Although SCUBA has allowed researchers to explore coral-reef habitat down to about 50 meters (150 feet) or so for decades, coral-reef ecosystems extend down to about 200 meters (660 feet) and more. For over 50 years, our team of researchers at Bishop Museum in Honolulu has pioneered the use of new technologies to explore coral reefs. These efforts included the use of early SCUBA and underwater photography in the mid-20th century, followed by the revolutionary application of mixed-gas diving and close-circuit rebreathers for coral-reef exploration starting in the 1980s (and continuing today), the use of advanced robots for deep sea exploration and the use of advanced DNA sequencing techniques to understand the geneology, evolutionary relationships and molecular makeup of creatures in these complex coral ecosystems. Now, Bishop Museum is about to launch the Center for the Exploration of Coral Reef Ecosystems (EXCORE), which aims to leverage decades of pioneering scientific exploration and discovery to fundamentally transform how coral-reef habitats and their inhabitants are documented and to glean a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of coral reefs.

We all feel considerable urgency in this undertaking. Humanity is in a race to document biodiversity before it is lost forever, and there has never been greater urgency for us to pick up the pace. The adverse effects of climate change, pollution, habitat destruction, over-exploitation and other factors are taking their toll on these systems, and may be converging to drive a great extinction. Extinction of any species is an irrevocable event, forever losing whatever important secrets it contained. Losing an entire ecosystem is a consequential calamity. At the least, study will document change in these ecosystems, and at best will prevent further decline and facilitate not only their preservation but also their natural persistence and growth.

This lecture will discuss the technologies we have developed for studying coral ecosystems at depths of several hundred meters, what we have learned about these richly complex ecosystems, and how we can ensure that they are not driven to extinction.

Selected Reading & Media References
Weiss, Kenneth R. 2017. Naturalist Richard Pyle explores the mysterious, dimly lit realm of deep coral reefs. Science 355(6328): 900–904. doi:10.1126/science.aal0838 (2 March 2017) http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/naturalist-richard-pyle-explores-mysterious-dimly-lit-realm-deep-coral-reefs

Menduno, Michael. 2017. The race to save the greatest library on Earth. Research, Education and Medicine: Researcher Profile. Alert Diver. November 2, 2017. 57-61. https://dan.org/alert-diver/article/the-race-to-save-the-greatest-library-on-earth/

Elias, Jason. 2023. Living at the Edge of the Unknown: Deep Coral Reef Pioneer Dr. Richard Pyle on A Life of Exploration. Big Deep – An Ocean Podcast. 12 September 2023. 21 minutes. https://open.spotify.com/episode/0iobNuMcPDM6miLEQNMVIj

Science Funding: A question of Priorities (2017, 4.5 mins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbhEaYpVrSs

Endangered — Earth’s greatest library | Richard Pyle | TEDxHonolulu (2012, 15 mins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRFGUT594ug

Creatures Of The Deep (2015, 1 hr, 11 mins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD3RuqLP18U

Deep Diving, New Species Discovery and the Greatest Library on Earth, Natural History Museum (2015, 1 hr, 4 mins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cUnkz9wSCU